Helsinki White (15 page)

Saukko invested part of this fortune in art and constructed his luxurious Villa Veikko, a mansion on a large tract of land fronted by the sea. Beside Villa Veikko is the family museum run by their foundation. Saukko diversified his corporation, Ilmarinen Sisu, and invested in the machine tool, ice cutter and paper industries, all of which flourished. After some years, Saukko foresaw the future. He divested his interests in the aforementioned industries and reinvested in securities and quantitative investment, the arms industries of various countries, investment fund management, technology and media. He believed the future of fortune building lay in technology and media manipulation, and arming Third World nations for small wars. He bought heavily into Nokia and Sanoma. As of today, his corporation controls nearly a quarter of Sanoma Corporation, his interest in it is valued at more than three hundred million euros. Forbes recently named him the five hundred and fifty-sixth richest man in the world, and the richest man in Finland, with investments in around fifty nations totaling 1.7 billion dollars.

Saukko comes from a long line of landed gentry. His father, Juho Saukko, was a lawyer, a politician and foreign minister who negotiated with the Soviet Union prior to the Second World War. During the Continuation War, Juho headed the Prisoner of War Office. After the war, in 1946, Juho was tried in a court-martial, but the charges were dropped. Post-war, he was a CEO or officer in several corporations, and headed the supervisory board in one of the nation’s largest banks. He also presided over the Finnish American Association. Juho was a devout racist, an admirer of Henry Ford’s opinions on race, in agreement with Nazi beliefs about race, and was fascinated by eugenics and the concept of Finnish racial purity.

According to his children, Veikko Saukko was an abused child, both physically and psychologically. His father was stern, critical, and impossible to please. Saukko himself is profane, cruel and violence-prone, known for striking employees without provocation, and his enjoyment of drunken bar brawls has resulted in him being locked up in drunk tanks in various cities around the world. He smokes three packs of cigarettes a day, has been an alcoholic since an early age, and even today, at age sixty-nine, habitually drinks four gin and tonics per hour. Several years ago, he spent three months in jail for drunk driving. His known associates include influential racists and a number of mafiosi from various countries. Saukko inherited his father’s racist views, and has no qualms about expressing them, either privately or publicly.

Saukko has a complex personality. Despite the above, adjectives used by friends and acquaintances to describe him include: charming, sensitive, droll, profound, open, timid, dreadfully shy, and a sophisticated and entertaining conversationalist. He’s also one of Finland’s most skilled open-sea yachtsmen. A picture emerges of a manic-depressive, even schizophrenic man.

His first wife, Anna-Leena, bore him five children, three girls and two boys. He divorced her suddenly and without apparent provocation after thirty-six years of marriage. Three weeks later, he married Tuula Jaatinen, age twenty-six. Tuula was made director of the Saukko art foundation and began embezzling right away. Over the course of two years, she absconded with, at best estimation, 10.2 million euros. She was tried and convicted for embezzlement, but disappeared rather than serve her three-year prison sentence.

Currently, Tuula lives in Switzerland. Finnish authorities
requested that the Swiss return her to Finland, but the Swiss prevented the extradition. She’s wanted by Interpol, as requested by Finnish officials. Her location in Switzerland is known to Finnish police and press. Interestingly, she’s still married to Veikko Saukko, even though, aside from the embezzlement described above, she’s rumored to have been the lover of Veikko’s son, Antti—also married with children—throughout the course of her marriage to Veikko.

Veikko’s first wife, Anna-Leena, is in deep legal difficulties herself. As former director of the foundation, she was accused, via multiple lawsuits, of misappropriation of funds. In 2007, she declared bankruptcy, after being court-ordered to return 17.5 million euros to the foundation.

The five Saukko children all live at home, with the exceptions of Kaarina, deceased, and Antti, missing for nearly a year, in the mansion that stands two hundred meters behind the museum. Veikko insists that he stays surrounded by his children, whether single or married, and that they reside in the mansion. He enforces this through financial blackmail. His children are:

His children despise their father and have made no effort, not even in the media, to pretend otherwise. Some of them believe he has a narcissistic personality disorder, and a total inability to feel empathy. They complain that he subjects them to late-night drunken monologues, and pits them against one another by constantly changing the provisions of their inheritances.

Veikko, for many years, put off choosing which of his children would take over the family business. Finally, apparently no believer in primogeniture and for reasons incomprehensible, Veikko chose Antti, the prodigal son, and transferred all power in the family company to him without informing his other children. This despite that Antti had for years called his father an asshole, a human monster, the worst sort of pig, and probably fucked his wife on a regular basis.

The children had formerly felt a solidarity. When Antti was chosen, that solidarity disappeared, and they began slagging one another in the media. Janne was sacked from his position on the
board of directors. Each of the other children had held honorary positions in the corporation, to provide them with exorbitant incomes. They were also let go, and are now at the complete mercy of their father for income. This situation continued until August 2008 when Antti—in the same way that he was appointed, and equally unfathomably—was removed as chairman of the board, and complete control over the company reverted back to Veikko. This remained the family dynamic for the better part of a year.

Then in 2009, on May twenty-seventh, almost a year ago, two of the Veikko children, Antti and Kaarina, were kidnapped from the family home, and at the same time, paintings Veikko had recently acquired, by Cézanne, Lautrec and Mary Cassatt, were stolen. As the children came and went without notice for lengths of time, and although the theft of the paintings was realized the following day, the absence of Antti and Kaarina wasn’t taken seriously by either the family or authorities for three days, and then only because they couldn’t be located for questioning concerning the theft.

These two members of the Saukko industrial dynasty were kidnapped and held hostage for ransom. A kidnapping of such magnitude from such a powerful family was unprecedented in Finland. A long and complicated course of events unfolded.

May thirtieth: The brother and sister were declared by the police to be considered missing persons. However, the police didn’t immediately assume kidnapping to be the reason for their disappearance.

June second: A ransom e-mail was sent, in English, to the family matriarch, Anna-Leena. It read:

I noted that this was inconsistent with demand number two, as they had already stated that they had the mobile phone number. Were they careless, or working to give the impression of carelessness?

Anna-Leena called her former husband, Veikko. He went against the kidnappers’ wishes and called the police immediately. He also made the requested initial contact by e-mail. The police considered whether the kidnapping was legitimate, and if so, whether the kidnappers’ use of English was a reasonable indication that Kaarina and Antti were truly now outside of Finland. Veikko Saukko made it clear that the police were to investigate, but should they fail to recover his children, the ransom would be paid according to the kidnappers’ instructions, whatever their demands might be.

Over the coming days, hundreds of police took part in the
investigation, headed by the Helsinki Police Department, and the minister of the interior was kept informed of every action and development. The police had two significant clues.

1. Although the stolen paintings were valuable, artwork of far greater value was left untouched. Presumably, the kidnappings were perpetrated at the same time that the art thefts occurred. The stolen paintings were recently acquired and as yet uninsured. This displayed knowledge that insurance companies will continue investigations for years, long after police have thrown in the towel, thus demonstrating that the kidnappers and thieves were experienced and knowledgeable criminals. They devoted a great deal of attention to doing their homework, somehow accessing privileged information about which paintings were most prudent to steal.

2. The villa’s security system was disabled. Investigation of the company that installed the villa’s system revealed that the files detailing the Saukko security system were accessed on Sunday the ninth of May, almost three weeks prior to the crime. A great deal of time, thought and preparation went into the crime beforehand. The security company had noticed no signs of break-in, a slick job, and the files were user name and password protected, so the criminals were technologically savvy. These were people to be reckoned with.

No effort or expense was spared. The kidnapping sparked a major operation involving the police, the Defence Forces, the Border Guard, and Finnish Customs.

June fifth: The small airfield at Kiikala was shut down to aid in the investigation of the kidnapping. Under the pretense of an exercise, civil aviation assisted police authorities by restricting the use of the airspace between Helsinki and Turku for nearly the
next two weeks. Radio-controlled pilotless planes from the Finnish Defence Forces’ base in Niinisalo were taken to Kiikala for use in discreet reconnaissance work. Equipped with powerful cameras, the diminutive unmanned aircraft were able to transmit high-resolution images from an altitude of two thousand meters or even higher. Police refrained from the use of traditional aircraft and helicopters in the search, for fear that they would alert the kidnappers and the result would have fatal consequences for the Saukko siblings.

On June ninth, authorities give up on the search from the sky. The Kiikala airfield was re-opened.

There was a gap in Saska’s notes here. Saska doesn’t make such mistakes. I took it that there was information he wished to hold back for reasons of his own, and he deemed that information irrelevant to my investigation. I trusted his judgment. I wouldn’t question it.

June tenth: Veikko Saukko e-mailed the kidnappers and informed them that he had raised the cash and was prepared to make the exchange. He was given the following instructions. He was to park a car at one p.m. in a specific space in a parking garage in Helsinki. The bags of cash were to be in the trunk, the key taped under the rear bumper. An orange traffic cone should be placed in the adjacent space to the right to reserve it.

The kidnappers chose their parking spot well. Only one security camera picked up on them, and they were obviously disguised in wigs, sunglasses and false facial hair. In front sat a driver. In the rear, Kaarina Saukko and a man holding a surgical saw in one hand and a scalpel in the other. Kaarina’s eyes and mouth were covered by tape. The driver moved the cone, parked, and transferred the
sports bags of money to the front seat of his own car. They left the garage and were monitored by UAV aircraft until they entered a forested area near Turku under tree cover, out of view.